Wednesday, November 7, 2018

“Let us never forget that government
is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our
democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government
officials, but the voters of this country.”

-Franklin D. Roosevelt

Neither side was humiliated; both
can claim victory to some extent, which is extremely rare for a midterm election,
especially one with such a polarizing and unpopular President. However, both
parties should feel a sense of humility and that means it was a good night for
America.

There was no blue wave as
Democrats not only failed to flip the Senate but actually lost seats, and while
they made some gains in Governor races, they came up short in key swing states
like Florida and Ohio. Also, the majority of House seats they picked up were in
districts that Hillary Clinton won, meaning there was already a built-in
anti-Trump voting block there. They failed to flip many of the districts that
Obama and Trump both carried, which a blue wave would have done. Meanwhile,
Republicans were also sent a clear message by the electorate that people want a
check on this President and a return to balance of power in Washington. No more
one party rule.

If you look at the graphic below,
the visual shows a balance between red and blue, across the board. These mixed
results tell me two things.

First, and most importantly the
country rejected Trump’s dangerous vilification of immigrants (which was his
closing argument on the campaign trail) by giving Democrats the power to stop
unconscionable policies like separating and detaining children. Second, while
even his supporters disagree with the President’s most extreme policies and
sharp elbows, they are willing to support initiatives that make sense like
re-negotiating trade agreements to better protect US wages, infrastructure
spending to create jobs and efforts to bring down the ridiculous cost of
life-saving prescription drugs. And Democrats would do well to remember that if
the majority of the electorate supported blind resistance to this President,
there would have been a blue wave flipping many more states and local races.

Democrats should also consider that
midterms are historically a rebuke of the President and the majority
party and much less a vote of confidence in the opposition. So the party that
had been hollowed out under Obama,
losing the US Senate, the House, the majority of Governorship's, and state and
local legislatures, will now need to work to regain the trust of the
electorate, based on their actions leading up to 2020, and not by simply being
blindly partisan or obstructionist.

The other important factor to
support my conclusion is that the majority of Democratic congressional
candidates who won campaigned as centrists.
Majority are newcomers who said they were tired of the partisan gamesmanship
and were running to fix Washington by reaching across the aisle. Importantly,
not one of these candidates ran on the promise to remove the President from
office or ever mentioned impeachment.

What we are seeing from albeit a
divided electorate is a mandate for both parties to work together and low
tolerance for blind partisan resistance and political payback. They want their
elected representatives to find solutions to non-partisan issues that are
important to all Americans. Frankly, I believe government works better when
both sides are forced to compromise and neither has a complete majority; it
seems many Americans agree.

I was glad to see Nancy Pelosi
strike a conciliatory tone after seeing the results described above. She talked
about unifying the country by working together with the President for all
Americans, while ensuring they would also be a check on his worst instincts.
The President also called Ms. Pelosi to congratulate her and
Mr. Schumer, expressing a desire to work with Democrats.

Now Ms. Pelosi will need to ensure
that her caucus shows the same maturity and steers clear of frivolous subpoenas
and investigation like Benghazi, or wasting taxpayer money trying to impeach
the President (unless Mr. Mueller finds something incriminating). Instead,
Democrats need to focus on delivering on the promises that their young
and historically diverse group of
Congress women and men made to their constituents – that of working with the
President to secure the future of DREAMERS, funding infrastructure to create
jobs and fixing Obamacare once and for all, issues that a majority of Americans
agree on.

Of course, none of this means that the
President will change his behaviour or that both
parties will forgive, forget and put aside ideological differences and divisive
rhetoric. However, I believe that the party that makes an effort to reach
across the aisle and is genuinely seen to be fighting for all Americans will
reap the rewards in 2020.

Monday, November 5, 2018

"There
is a battle of two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, jealousy,
greed, resentment, lies, inferiority and ego. The other is good. It is joy,
peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy and truth. Which wolf wins? The
one you feed."-Cherokee proverb

A few months after the 2016 US
election I was at a café in New York and there were two men sitting next to me,
talking loudly. I did not recognise either man but the younger one was boasting
about his press interviews and TV appearances. They were talking animatedly
about the election and how Democrats needed to fight back against Trump. The
thing that stayed with me about their conversation was both men having a good
laugh at Michelle Obama’s expense, saying she was stupid and naïve in
saying “When they go low, we go high”; the younger guy suggested
that Democrats needed to go, not high, but subterranean, when Republicans went
low.

After watching Mr. Kavanagh’s recent
confirmation process it is clear that the left has taken a page out of the
above operatives’ playbook and left the wise words of the Obamas far behind. To
say that the Democrats behaved shockingly would be an understatement. Not only
did they abandon all pretenses of civility and fairness, but most
dishearteningly they started to emulate the same bullying and fearmongering
tactics that I have always despised in Mr. Trump. This was not so much about
the political gloves coming off, which would have been fine, as it was about
abandoning core principles of decency, impartiality and objectivity, which are
values that should be considered even more sacrosanct by Democrats in the age
of Trump.

From the outset the left made it
clear they would blindly block any person without considering their record.
Even before the nominee’s name was announced protestors had assembled outside
the Supreme Court building and a reporter from ABC news noticed that in many
instances the “signs were already filled
out...except for the name.”

It was not just liberal pressure
groups who behaved badly. Senior Democrats also lined up and vowed in effect to
make this an unethical and unprincipled fight. Mr. Schumer, the Senate Minority
leader, went on CBS News and announced that he was ready to oppose the
President's Supreme Court nominee with "everything I've got". The
problem with purely partisan and blind ideological battles is that you only end
up talking to a small zealous minority within your own base and nobody else.
Many other senior Democratic Senators, instead of taking the high ground,
followed suit, vilifying and attacking Mr. Kavanaugh personally.

Mr. Booker and Ms. Warren, both 2020
Presidential hopefuls, held a press conference where they stated that senators “who
don’t oppose President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh
are complicit in the
evil.” I understand that politics is a messy business and not for
the faint of heart, and have absolutely no issue with brawls based on policy and
a nominee’s judicial record; this is fair game in a confirmation process, but
what Democratic Senators did was to take a page out of the book of the same
unprincipled President that they claim to be fighting against. All this
transpired months before Ms. Ford came forward with her allegations.

Given this irresponsible
fearmongering by senior party leaders, it is no surprise that an intern working
for Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee was arrested after being caught illegally “posting private
information of several Republican U.S. senators on Wikipedia.”There
were also numerous instances ofprotestors angrily cornering and
haranguing Republican Senators all over the Capitol. Some of
the harassment was perpetrated even when lawmakers were at dinner with
their families.

Susan Collins's staff shared with
The New York Times copies of letters and multiple voice mail messages addressed
to the senator using vulgar language and outright threats. One caller told
a 25-year-old female staff member at one of Ms. Collins’s Maine offices that “he hoped she would be
raped and impregnated.”

The behaviour of Democratic Senators
during the hearings also left a lot to be desired. They came across like clowns
and petulant children, often behaving in the way Mr. Trump does at his
political rallies. Senator Booker compared himself to Spartacus, only to look
like a buffoon, when he begged to be punished for releasing documents
already cleared for release. He did succeed in ensuring I will not vote for him in
2020. Another Presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris, was seen pouting like a
three year old who had just been told the family trip Disneyland was cancelled.
Rather than stand her ground and make a case like a mature adult and US
Senator, she childishly stormed out of a committee meeting when Republicans
refused to direct the FBI to conduct an additional background check.

Interestingly, a Harvard University
CAPS-Harris poll conducted after Ms. Ford and Mr. Kavanaugh had given their
public testimonies found that 60% of voters supported
the confirmation of Kavanaugh, provided the FBI supplemental
investigation found no corroborating evidence. With the majority of Americans
agreeing the need for a supplemental investigation, the Democrats could have
come out with a win ahead of a crucial midterm election where flipping the
Senate would have allowed them to provide a serious check on a reckless President.
Instead, their behaviour galvanised the Republican base and likely squandered
any chance of their flipping the Senate. This sad event was a huge lost
opportunity to show the nation that Democrats can be the grown-ups in the room
with a President who behaves like a spoiled brat.

The same CAPS-Harris poll found that
amajority of voters believe the confirmation process was
politicized and mishandled by both sides, with 69% callingit a “national
disgrace". Had Democrats acted like mature, rational adults they
would likely have softened many independents and perhaps even won over the
large number of Republicans who despise Mr. Trump and are actively looking for
reasons to vote Democrat. Instead, Democrats came out looking childish,
hysterical and cartoonish to all but a small group who will vote for them even
if they started shooting people
on Fifth Avenue.

A few days after Justice Kavanaugh
was sworn in, Mr. Obama’s former Attorney General, Eric Holder, said at a
campaign rally "Michelle [Obama] always says “When they go low, we go
high…"No. No. When they go low, we kick them." I understand that many Democrats feel Obama was
weak in the face of Mitch McConnell’s bullying and that this cheated them out
their nominee. It is true that Mr. McConnell
played dirty politics and politically outmaneuvered the Democrats, but he never
went after Mr. Garland’s reputation or tried to discredit him personally;
unlike what Democrats did with Mr. Kavanaugh.

What Democrats need to remember is
there are some lines they should never be willing to cross, no matter
how great the cause. If they continue to cross these lines with impunity, and
at every turn, then there will come a point when the wider electorate will no
longer be see any difference between Mr. Trump and an opposition that claims to
be better than him.

Monday, October 29, 2018

“There
is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience.
It supersedes all other courts.”-Mahatma
Gandhi

Governments routinely do business
with oppressive regimes based on geopolitical, intelligence-sharing and
counter-terrorism requirements. I am not absolving governments, but merely
stating the realities of operating a complex and increasingly inter-connected
world where it is harder to be black and white about these choices. However the
same constraints do not hold true for private corporations. There is nothing
preventing them from boycotting or refusing to take money from bad actors and brutally
oppressive regimes, particularly when they go against the stated values of the
company.

I think we can also make a
distinction between older generation of companies and the new ones in the
digital age. The Exxon Mobiles and Goldman Sachs’s of the world never claimed
to be ‘do-gooders’ or touted the inherent social values of their business
models. They were clear about focusing on the bottom line, profits and
increasing shareholder value above all else and did not care if they were
profiting from Mother Theresa or Nicolas Maduro.

However, Silicon Valley startups have
always claimed to have a strong moral compass and repeatedly tout the social
good they do and stand for. They have corporate motto's that say things like “Don’t be Evil” and spend much on PR touting all the good they do in the
world. Yet the vast majority of these same companies have found ways to
rationalize and do business with Saudi Arabia. Uber justified its launch in
Saudi Arabia in 2014 by saying it would help women who were not allowed to
drive, even though Saudi women were against Uber launching.

While it is true that Saudi rulers
have always ruled with an iron fist, most limited their brutality to within
their own borders and also took pains to manage the optics for
their democratic and freedom-loving allies. However, with the appointment of
Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS as he is known, the Kingdom’s transgressions have
not only grown bolder but now go well beyond their borders.

The Prince began his reign by
extra-judicially imprisoning elite businessmen and ruling family members, reportedly torturing and coercing them to hand over billions in
cash and properties, publicizing his actions as a ‘crackdown on corruption'. He
also purged the security services and other high ranking government officials,
filling key posts with loyalists. He has placed his mother under house arrest to keep her from advising her husband, the King, whose health
is dwindling and his moments of lucidity said to be fleeting.

It is true that MBS has opened a few
movie theaters and has finally given Saudi women the right to drive, but at the
same time he has jailed and exiled leading women activists, purged
the clerical ranks and ruthlessly suppressed all dissent. Yet, Silicon Valley has been championing MBS as
great reformer. It seems that the billions invested in
cash-starved Unicorns have washed away all of MBS’s sins and Silicon Valley’s
corporate ethics along with them.

Companies ranging from Google and Facebook to
Blackrock have all been clamoring to shake MBS's hand and strike lucrative
deals with the Kingdom. It is no surprise then that MBS grows more reckless,
as companies continue to pat him on the back, and
felt emboldened enough to brazenly murder a journalist who was a US
permanent resident, and expected to face no consequences for
this heinous crime.

·Saudis own 5% in Tesla, 5% in Uber (making them the largest
shareholder), 5% of Lyft, 5.2% of Twitter (which is more than Jack Dorsey owns)
and 2.3% of Snapchat.·They invested $461 million in Magic Leap, the hottest US
virtual reality company.·They have committed $20 billion to Blackstone Group’s
infrastructure fund.·Through the Softbank Vision Fund, in which Saudi Arabia is
the principle investor, they have invested:o$4.4 billion in WeWorko$2.25 billion in GM Cruise HoldingsoThey own shares in WAG, Slack, Door Dash and SoFi.

It is true that the Saudi’s have
also invested in UK, French, Indian and Chinese companies but the bulk is US
based companies.

I am not naïve and understand that
business cannot succeed based on purely moral decision-making; profit motives
will always collide with doing what is right. For the most part companies manage
to find a reasonable balance between these two competing forces, but my issue
is that Silicon Valley pretends to wear morals and principles on its sleeve,
preaching that their growing monopolies are forces for good. How do they
justify being owned and increasingly funded by entities that make no bones
about having neither morals nor principles?

A large part of the problem lies not
in capitalism itself, but in the broken system of capitalism Silicon
Valley has engineered and vigorously championed in the last few decades. It is
a system that encourages a winner-take-all mentality and even rewards companies
that are not profitable.

Instead of using sound business
metrics like earnings, sales or revenue to measure companies, Silicon Valley
has made it dangerous and fashionable to look purely at things like
‘stickiness,’ in terms of how often users interact with a service or app on a
daily basis. As a result, companies are being incentivized to make long-term
losses and thus need constant infusions of cash to grow artificially and
rapidly expand their base of users.

Some of the most highly valued startups
today even lack real competitive differentiation and barriers to
entry like Uber and WeWork, so the only thing fueling their competitiveness
is infusions of cash. The issue with this winner-take-all model of capitalism,
one devoid of business fundamentals, is that it encourages companies to cut
corners, act in cut-throat ways, and ignore the most basic principles of
ethical behaviour - simply to stay ahead of competitors.

Ultimately, this model leads to
running out of ‘good’ money and avenues for hyper-growth, and startups are
forced to compromise on their stated ideals and acquiesce to any suitor with
deep pockets.

The truth is that this discussion
around Saudi Arabia’s behaviour should have taken place a long time ago. To
some extent one can understand why governments need to deal countries whose
values conflict with our own, but it is harder to make a case for why companies,
especially those who claim to cherish ‘values’ as a primary reason for their own
existence, are in bed with them.

While it is true that many CEO’s
like Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber, and Larry Fink
of Blackrock dropped out of the recent Saudi investment conference, the BBC
reported the majority of these companies still sent junior executives to
represent them. Not one of them has cut business ties with Saudi Arabia, and I
suspect that no matter what the outcome of the Khashoggi murder investigation is,
most of them will not sever ties, as Larry Fink stated on CNBC.

Irrespective of whether MBS is
directly implicated or not, I hope that Mr. Khashoggi’s brazen and brutal
pre-meditated murder will serve as a wake up for the rest of us. While I do not
expect Tesla, Uber or WeWork to be returning the billions they have received
anytime soon, I do hope we will begin to hold
these companies more accountable for their actions and stop being swayed by their words alone.